The scope of Irish scholarship may in some measure be judged from the existing works of the great and better-known scholars mentioned in this and other chapters, but the precise influence of that scholarship is more difficult to estimate. It is only in very recent years that we have begun to realise how much native Irish literature and history owes to the Irish monastic schools. In the wider field of European scholarship there is still much room for investigation before we can confidently assign to Irish monastic scholarship its proper place. The superiority of Irish classical learning has been demonstrated and is now acknowledged by practically all scholars who have made an intensive study of the early Middle Ages.[536] But as a discerning historian has remarked, “what is of greatest significance is the fact that there reigned not only among the professed scholars but among the plain missionaries (whose name was legion) a classical spirit, a love of literature for its own sake and a keen delight in poetry. They brought imagination, they brought spiritual force to a world well nigh sunk in materialism.... Their lighter productions show but one side of their Scottish nature. Their earnest single pursuit of learning in the widest sense attainable, their solid hard work as scholars is no less characteristic. Ireland was once the university not only of Northern England, but of the Frankish realm and if that progress was arrested after the fatal inroads of the Norsemen after 795 A.D. the seed which the Scots had sown in other lands grew to a nobler maturity than ever it reached on its own soil.... Wherever they went they founded schools.”[537] Many other tributes to Irish monastic scholarship might be quoted. We have selected but two of these partly because of the weight of authority rightly associated with the author’s name in each case and partly because they summarise the detailed evidence we have presented during the course of our study. Turner says: “The Irish teachers left a lasting impression on their own and succeeding generations. Not only were they the chief teachers of grammar, poetry, astronomy, music, and geography when these branches had no other, or scarcely any other, representative on the continent of Europe, but they also profoundly influenced the course of mediæval thought in matters of philosophy and theology. Their elucidation of the Gospel of St. John and their commentaries on the Epistles of St. Paul formed a new school of exegesis.... They introduced the Neo-Platonic point of view in metaphysical speculation and carried the art of dialectic to a higher point than it ever before attained. It is no exaggeration to say that they were the founders of scholasticism and that Ireland is the Ionia of mediæval philosophy.”[538]